Tag Archives: how i met your mother

In Defense Of The How I Met Your Mother Finale

how i met your mother finale

Warning: spoilers abound!

How I Met Your Mother ended its legendary 9 year run last night, and the majority of people are reacting as though they just saw the Lost finale — or even worse, Dexter.

I liked the How I Met Your Mother finale. And here’s why.

The biggest complaint I’m seeing is that people are saying the whole show is “all for nothing” because although Ted found his true love (“The Mother”, whose name we learned was Tracy), she dies, and he winds up with Robin, who we met in the pilot.

First of all, it wasn’t “all for nothing” just because he winds up with Robin. Because the thing is, he let Robin go. Remember when we saw her float away like a horribly CGI’d balloon? It was only because he let her go that he could accept love, and from Tracy, who became the mother of his children.

That’s very important. He was happy with Tracy.

And then Tracy died.

And that’s life. People die sometimes. Is it fair? No. But it doesn’t diminish the time they had together. Those times were very real and very meaningful for Ted. He wasn’t secretly in love with Robin the entire time. He let her go and he started his life. And Tracy dying doesn’t mean that none of it happened. Death is not a reset button, and it’s insulting to someone’s memory to say that it is.

Six years later, he’s telling his kids the story of how he met their mother, which his kids cheekily point out seems more like the story of “how you have the hots for Aunt Robin.” But his kids aren’t mad, because 1. they want their dad to be happy and 2 they can obviously see how much love he had for their mom, which he did. And we shouldn’t be mad either, because we want Ted to be happy, too.

The whole show wasn’t about how Ted met the mother — we learn this at the end of the very first episode (“like I said, it’s a long story). And it is a long story. About how he learned to love, and move on. And just because, six years later, he has the hots for Aunt Robin doesn’t mean he’d trade her for Tracy. He begged for 45 more days with Tracy, remember?

But in life, to quote Tracy, “you have to move forward.” She would want him to move forward.

So he does, with someone who knows him so well — Aunt Robin.

The next biggest complaint I see is people bemoaning Robin and Ted together because they haven’t worked in the past, so why would they work now? How about because they’re in different places now? They’re in their 40’s now. When they met, they were in their 20’s. Do you have any idea what a different person you’ll be when you’re 40 compared to when you’re 27? I’m not saying you’re going to change completely. I’m saying that people grow up. What didn’t work then could easily work now. Robin’s career is in a different place. She’s settled down (we can see that because she has approximately a thousand dogs again). She’s ready.

And Ted is ready. And they’re not crashing in the same car, they’re getting in a new car on a new road. I hope to God I’m a different person at 40 than I am in my 20’s. I hope I’m more secure, more confident, more embracing of the world and all it has to offer. I hope that there will be someone for me outside my window with a blue french horn.

And why is it such a surprise that they wind up together? The show ended how it began, with Ted holding up the stolen blue french horn (must be a great restaurant, it’s been open forever). The difference is that now it can work.

I liked Barney and Robin together until it became pretty clear that Barney didn’t want to get married; he kept making his same stupid sexist jokes throughout their entire engagement. At their wedding, he promised he would never lie to Robin, then immediately lied to her about having a gorilla flower girl. There were signs it wasn’t going to work.

And that’s why I’m not mad about their divorce. Divorce is real, and it happens. Sometimes you don’t even see it coming. That’s life.

In the end, everybody got what they wanted, and what they needed. I’m happy that Robin and Ted are together. He made it rain for her, you guys. He made it rain.

My only problem with the finale? The pacing. By the time Barney found out he was going to be a dad, I couldn’t help but say, “This is weird” out loud. But how good a payoff was that scene when he was saying hello to his baby daughter for the first time? And it changed him in ways marrying Robin couldn’t. Instead of hitting on 2 young women at the bar, he tells them to go home, change their outfits, and call their parents.

There were a lot of years crammed into that 1 hour (technically 40 something minutes, minus commercials) and it made my head spin but then I realized — that’s kind of how life is. And I liked seeing the flash forwards. I liked knowing where they wound up, and technically, they’re not really flashforwards but flashbacks, as Ted has been telling this story to his kids since day 1 and everything that happened on the show was a flashback.

The finale gave me hope that life will always provide for us in ways we may not expect. I wish the show hadn’t spent an entire season on one wedding and that the finale didn’t spend years in an hour, but other than that, I wouldn’t change a thing.

“I really hope you get her someday,” Victoria, Ted’s ex, told him, of Robin.

Ted did it, you guys. He’s happy. Let’s be happy for him.

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In Which “How I Met Your Mother” Nails Friendship

friendship

How I Met Your Mother is so good at being “real life” sometimes. They’re wrapping up the series and in this particular episode, they show what happens to all of the minor and secondary characters, while The Kinks sing “Where Are They Now?” over an uninterrupted 3 minute shot of each character in their little setting with narration over it. Very Wes Anderson. And then the narrator finishes with this:

You will be shocked, kids, when you discover how easy it is in life to part ways with people forever.

And I went, “Oof.” Not out loud, but who knows, maybe it was out loud. I’m getting to that age where I’m less aware of what I say out loud. Which makes it sound like I’m getting to the age of 84. I am not.

But I am getting older, and I’m discovering some things about getting older that really suck. Things beyond having to use extra cash to buy boring shit like toothpaste. Things beyond worrying about paying bills, like some stupid country song you’d hear on the radio for 4 seconds because you changed the station too fast because it’s such a cliché. No, I mean things like that above quote from How I Met Your Mother.

It really is shockingly easy to part ways with people forever.

And I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Part of getting older is realizing that every relationship — even, if not especially, those you have with your friends — take work. You take your friendships for granted. You think they’ll always be there. Then somebody moves. Or goes to grad school. Or gets married. Or changes careers. And suddenly, no one has time for anyone anymore. And you become one of those thousands of people who say things like, “I’m sorry, I’m just swamped.” (Hint: do not EVER tell anyone you are “booked”. You are not a dentist’s office. You are a person. People cannot be booked. Got it? Good.)

You have no time for seeing your friends anymore, and they don’t have time to see you. You’ll go back and forth with calls and texts and emails and then one day you’ll finally catch up and it will be wonderful and you’ll say you have to do it again…and then you don’t. Ever. And then they move to New York or get married and maybe you’ll be invited and maybe you won’t, and that will be the end of it.

That’s just how it gets when you get older. And no one told me that. No one told me that when you get older, you have to work harder on your friendships. I don’t even know if I have a best friend anymore. I think those went the way of Lisa Frank stickers and Happy Meals — they faded into my youth. I’m just a boring adult who is struggling with work and money and being an adult.

So if I tell you I want to hang out with you, please, hold me to it. I’ll do my best, and I have anxiety about driving, but I’ll try real hard. Because the problem with forever is that it’s pretty damn permanent.

I miss you, Simone.

Photo by Nina Leen, 1950, via LIFE Photo Archives for Google.

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Missing Holden Caulfield.

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Holden Caulfield, via J.D. Salinger once said,

Don’t ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody.

This has always stuck with me.

You know how certain songs cause you to time travel? You hear a song and your mind takes you back to where you were where you heard it and what you felt and who was there. When I hear “Thirteen” by Big Star I remember this incredible date this sweet guy took me on in New York. I didn’t have a lot of time and I warned him, trying to convince him that we couldn’t go out because even though I wanted to, I knew it wouldn’t work out. I was just too busy. But he was persistent, and not in a creepy way. In a way that was so sincere that I let my smile take up my entire face. I told him I had, “like, two minutes” — and he took it to heart. He hailed a cab and we went to an Italian restaurant…down the street. We went through three courses in about one minute. Literally. He planned this ahead. We took our leftovers over to a movie…on the sidewalk. He set up a TV to play Manos: Hands Of Fate, the best of the worst films ever made. It’s such a bad film that he was able to condense the entire thing into twenty seconds. Then he asked if we had time for coffee. Well, we had about thirty seconds. We went back to the Italian place that suddenly had coffee and desert set up on the table. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. And somewhere, “Thirteen” by Big Star was playing. And I will forever tie that song to that incredible memory. It didn’t work out between us. I eventually went back to my ex.

Also, none of this happened to me, this happened on How I Met Your Mother.

Ha ha. Got you.

Sorry. I don’t know why I did that.

I got terribly astray from what I was saying, which was that if you let it, anything can remind you of everything. As humans we try to find connections in our lives, where there are none. For example, you’ll tell your friend over lunch about someone you went to high school with, and hours later, you’ll run into that very person on the street. And you’ll say, “My God, what are the odds?!” But if you really thought about it, you’d realize that the odds weren’t that extreme; maybe you were in an area where your former classmate lived, or you only noticed your classmate walking down the street because you had just mentioned them, or your classmate mentioned on Facebook a place they went to for lunch and that’s why you went there; you simply disassociated your classmate from the entire experience because it’s more meaningful to believe that it all happened by some delightful wink of the universe.

don draper wink

Okay, look, I’ll finally get what I’ve been trying to get to. And that is, it’s nearly impossible to forget anybody or anything you’ve ever done that ever meant something, even if it was only slightly. I’ll see a girl wearing fingerless gloves and I’ll think of 14th street in NYC. I’ll hear a Bob Dylan song and have a sudden and brief fervent passion for a boy I had a crush on in college. I’ll smell a certain shampoo and remember my staying with my ex-boyfriend at his house in Rochester. And I do these things — we all do these things — because we want to. Even though it hurts. Because unless you’re a psychopath, you can’t but feel emotion, even if it’s people you think you don’t give a monkey about. It creeps in, but you don’t notice it. To you, it’s like, “Why the hell am I missing Stephanie from elementary school? I haven’t thought about her in years.” It rains and I think about my apartment in New York City. And I think about what a hassel it was — but a great hassel — to move in. I thought about how it would be a ragtag group of me and my friends dragging a couch up a staircase like in Friends. Asking them, hey, can you move for free? I’ll treat you guys to coffee. And then I’m nostalgic for a moment that never even happened.

And that’s why I understand Holden Caulfield, that beloved outcast, so beloved by our generation it’s become cliche. Because nostalgia will fucking kill you if you let it. It’s like alcohol or drugs. Some people can enjoy nostalgia recreationally. Others let it ruin them. The worst thing is that sometimes you don’t even need to talk to someone from your past. All you have to do is see their photo or time travel via a song or memory and you’re right there and by the time you come back, you’re completely hungover with nostalgia.

God, imagine how i’m going to feel when I’m forty.

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